TreeAlive

Atlas

Old maps

To zoom closer, turn on Old maps or Landscape.

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Layers

Color by how it's checkedEach outline shaded by its sources, not by country LandscapeThe shape of the ground, United States only; zoom in close

Sources

Lines join a person's last known place to the next. Tap the diamond at the end.

Pick a date to see who held the land that day, and who ran it where that differed. Click a place for the treaty or law behind its outline, or our note that one is still owed. This map is a work in progress: Europe from 1816, the United States from 1776 and Canada from 1867 follow their sources; elsewhere and earlier, the borders are approximate and labeled as such.

Each color is one country; the US states share one. Click a place for its sources. Red outline: a known error. An independent period map disagrees with this outline; it is being redrawn.

Key to the map

hatched: occupation, dependency, dual claim or lease over the land beneath dotted, uncertain side: the ground is drawn on one side of the border, but which side it lay on is not established striped in two colors: land held jointly by two or more states dashed: an estimated line Approximate outlines are drawn from Cliopatria (Seshat Global History Databank) and, in North America from 1565, from TreeAlive’s American Frontier map. They are used everywhere except Europe from 1 July 1816, the United States from 4 July 1776 and Canada from 1 July 1867. United States from 4 July 1776: the states and territories follow the Newberry Library’s Atlas of Historical County Boundaries, which we are checking outline by outline. Canada from 1 July 1867: the borders follow Natural Resources Canada’s Territorial Evolution of Canada. outlined, at different years between 1767 and 1868 in the Southeast, the Ohio valley, the Great Lakes, the upper Mississippi, the Red River valley of the North, the Southwest, the Columbia plateau and the lower Missouri and the Arkansas valleys: Indigenous homelands from the Royce 1899 cession maps, each redrawn on the day a treaty changed it and shown until the day of its last treaty. Click one for its name and its sources. More Indigenous homelands are being redrawn from public-domain sources.

Landscape: the shape of the ground from lidar, in the United States only (U.S. Geological Survey, 3D Elevation Program). Zoom in close to see it; where lidar was flown, old road beds, field walls and foundations can show. The borders hide when you zoom past the scale they were checked to, about 6 km.

Period maps: old maps of this view, made within 25 years of the year on the slider.

How these are chosen

They are listed under the map by how much of the view each one fills (of those that fill most of it, the most detailed first), then by how near its year is. The first is shown; pick another to see it. The one shown is named and credited at the foot of the map. State and regional maps appear as you zoom in to a region, county and town maps closer in. An old map shows its maker's view of its own year, so it may not match the outlines: the borders lighten while one shows, and hide when you zoom past the scale they were checked to, about 6 km.

Each cited outline is checked by two separate runs of an AI model (Anthropic’s Claude): one reads the whole entry, and the other checks each quote against its source without seeing the first one’s verdict. Code checks that each quote appears on its linked page; where one doesn’t (58 of 5,344 today), its card says so. I decide any case they disagree on or can’t settle. source checked by a second, separate AI run draft: not all of its checks have passed yet Canada: the government's own record of its boundaries, cited as a whole no source yet, or a change that has been decided but not yet shown on the map known error: a comparison source disagrees with the outline approximate (Cliopatria or the American Frontier map): its own gray-blue ink, not one of the checks above; no instrument cited

Credits and licenses

Shapes: OpenHistoricalMap contributors (free to reuse under CC0, except the parts named below), with our corrections. Some river and border lines in them are OpenStreetMap data (© OpenStreetMap contributors, CC BY-SA 2.0, from OpenHistoricalMap’s 2013 import), and some border segments come, under CC BY 4.0 and changed by us, from the municipal lines of ©Kartverket (Norway); from Spain’s municipal lines, credited as the holder asks: “Obra derivada de BDLJE CC-BY 4.0 ign.es”; from the State border record of the Surveying and Mapping Authority of the Republic of Slovenia (edition not recorded by the OpenHistoricalMap contributors); and from Marine Regions (Flanders Marine Institute), including Territorial Seas (12NM), version 4, 2023 (doi:10.14284/633). Where the 2013 import’s lines were redrawn, they follow Natural Earth (public domain) and Vector Map Level 0 (VMap0) of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (US government, released without restriction). Some river lines were traced by hand from national and regional government map data. Under CC BY 4.0: the State Water Cadastre of the State Agency of Water Resources of Ukraine, the Reticolo Idrografico Regionale Unificato of Regione Lombardia, the DLM Gewässer of the Bundesamt für Eich- und Vermessungswesen (Austria), the Hidrografija HIDRO5 of the Direkcija Republike Slovenije za vode (Slovenia), the inland hydrography of the Latvijas Ģeotelpiskās informācijas aģentūra (Latvia) and the Georeference base cadastre © Ministry of Environment of the Republic of Lithuania, 2026. Under CC BY 3.0: the Database Topografico Regionale of Regione Emilia-Romagna. From Germany: the DLM250 of the Bundesamt für Kartographie und Geodäsie, © GeoBasis-DE / BKG (2026) dl-de/by-2-0, modified. Available free of charge under Article 40a of the Geodetic and Cartographic Law of Poland: BDOT10k of the Główny Urząd Geodezji i Kartografii. Others were traced from historical map sheets: the British War Office Balkans sheets of Series M506 (Crown copyright expired) and the Spezialkarte der Österreichisch-Ungarischen Monarchie 1:75 000 (Austria-Hungary, 1880s to 1900s; public domain). We changed every line we traced by hand, whatever its source. Some border segments in Ukraine come from OCHA with HDX (the Ukraine COD-AB dataset) under CC BY-IGO 3.0, changed by us. The inner edge of the 1871 Thionville strip follows the commune lines of ADMIN EXPRESS COG by IGN (France, edition of 1 January 2026, Licence Ouverte 2.0, retrieved 4 October 2026). Measured on 25 October 2026, 39.2 km of the OpenStreetMap lines credited above still lie on the Europe map, in 124 outlines; on the interactive atlas, each of those outlines gives its own length on its card. We are redrawing those OpenStreetMap lines from public-domain sources and from government map data published for reuse, and aim to finish by 31 December 2026. The CC BY-SA 2.0 notice above is for those line segments only: the rest of these outlines, and this site, are not offered under that license. Some border and sea lines also come from these sources, each changed by us: the Délimitations maritimes of Shom (France, edition not recorded by the OpenHistoricalMap contributors, Licence Ouverte 2.0); Bayerische Vermessungsverwaltung – www.geodaten.bayern.de (Bavaria, CC BY 4.0); the administrative limits of Istat (Italy, CC BY 4.0); and the Austrian base map, credited as the holder asks: “Datenquelle: basemap.at” (CC BY 4.0). Some border segments were copied into OpenHistoricalMap from OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors, Open Database License). Checks: Natural Earth (public domain). Most source names link to the holder’s own page. Approximate borders after Cliopatria by Ed Chalstrey and James Bennett (Seshat Global History Databank) v0.2.1 (Zenodo doi:10.5281/zenodo.23128623), CC BY 4.0, simplified by us, and from 1816 used only outside the area of the checked Europe map; we correct wrong lines there in our own copy; to report one, write to privacy@treealive.com. North America from 1565: approximate borders from TreeAlive’s American Frontier map, not independently checked, drawn from the US Census Bureau’s 2010 state outlines and Natural Earth (both public domain), the USDA Forest Service’s Tribal Lands Ceded to the United States (the Royce 1899 cession maps; public domain; CC0 1.0), Natural Resources Canada’s Atlas of Canada (Territorial Evolution of Canada) and our own lines from period maps and treaty terms; only shapes our rights review cleared are drawn, and more Indigenous homelands are being redrawn from public-domain sources. Canada from 1 July 1867: Natural Resources Canada, Atlas of Canada: Territorial Evolution of Canada, checked by us against maps of the time, and corrected by us in some places; the approximate borders are used only outside it. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada. United States from 4 July 1776, states and territories: the Newberry Library’s Atlas of Historical County Boundaries, U.S. Historical States and Territories (edited by John H. Long; Peter Siczewicz, digital compiler, 2011), CC0 1.0, which we are checking outline by outline; the approximate borders are used only outside it, and Indigenous homelands are drawn over it. Dioceses: Data Supplement for Digital Atlas of Dioceses and Ecclesiastical Provinces in Late Medieval Europe (1200-1500), by Dorin, Romani, Schlansky and Womack (Stanford Digital Repository, 2021), CC BY 3.0, simplified by us. Battles: Historical Conflict Event Dataset (Charles Miller, 2022; Harvard Dataverse, version 5.0), CC0 1.0; each point is the modern place its name points to. Roman roads: Itiner-e, static version 2024 (Itiner-e: the digital atlas of ancient roads © 2024 by Brughmans, Pažout, de Soto and Bjerregaard Vahlstrup; Zenodo), CC BY 4.0, reprojected and simplified by us. Basemap: OpenFreeMap, © OpenMapTiles, map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (Open Database License). Hillshade: Terrain Tiles (Mapzen, on AWS Open Data). ArcticDEM terrain data DEM(s) were created from DigitalGlobe, Inc., imagery and funded under National Science Foundation awards 1043681, 1559691, and 1542736; Australia terrain data © Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia) 2017; Austria terrain data © offene Daten Österreichs – Digitales Geländemodell (DGM) Österreich; Canada terrain data contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada; Europe terrain data produced using Copernicus data and information funded by the European Union - EU-DEM layers; Global ETOPO1 terrain data U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Mexico terrain data source: INEGI, Continental relief, 2016; New Zealand terrain data Copyright 2011 Crown copyright (c) Land Information New Zealand and the New Zealand Government (All rights reserved); Norway terrain data © Kartverket; United Kingdom terrain data © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2015. All rights reserved; United States 3DEP (formerly NED) and global GMTED2010 and SRTM terrain data courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey. Landscape mode (United States only): lidar relief from the U.S. Geological Survey, 3D Elevation Program (public domain).